Myrmurs is an innovative variant of the sestina form (a medieval mechanism of desire that spirals around six end words). Connecting medieval textuality to contemporary politics and poetics, this poem explores living systems: cities and languages as self-organizing entities; ants; interspecies entanglements; strange attachments; neocolonialism and how to break free of it. Following on her critically acclaimed debut collection fur(l) parachute (published by BookThug in 2013), this is the second volume in Shannon Maguire's planned medievalist trilogy.

"What a relief to find ant traffic arriving at our picnic. Maguire's poems are acrawl with chaser light shuttles and swaps and deep-kissing industry. Lie back on the cat lick pen nib and let the interswarm of city and green, dream and wake, queer and norm work through your ears, yielding nothing but gorgeous trouble." --Susan Holbrook, author of Joy is So Exhausting

Imagine a sestina taken apart by ants and reconfigured as segmented fruit. Imagine empty anglophone calories exposed as petroleum rainbows. Imagine a poetics propelled not by sensitivity to comparison or likeness, but instead by pheromones and their incommensurate, contrapuntal perceptual worlds. Shannon Maguire's Myrmurs experiments on a culture of experimentation. The result is a diffractive study of bodies of noise--in all their queer, incorrigible biological and linguistic volumes. This extraordinary book will crawl all over you. --Adam Dickinson, author of The Polymers

Shannon Maguire's first collection, fur(l) parachute, was shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Also the finalist of the bpNichol Chapbook Award for Fruit Machine, and the Manitoba Magazine Award for Best Suite of Poems for "The Fur Parachute Suite" in CV2, her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including the Best American Experimental Writing of 2014, Jacket2, Event, among others. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph, an MA in English from Brock University, and is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, where she studies noise and queer and Métis poetics. Born and raised in Sault Ste. Marie of predominantly Irish and Métis heritage, Shannon now divides her time between Waterloo, Toronto, and the Soo. Wherever she finds herself, she reads and writes incessantly.

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